


places in time

by kiden



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-06-21 00:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15545409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiden/pseuds/kiden
Summary: "Maybe Rodney would be the same, his forehead pressed to the ground, not bothering to hide his tears. But whatever hope he’d had before this left with John, and disappeared the moment Rodney realized he wouldn’t be coming back with it."A sad, sad story with a happy ending.(repost)





	places in time

There’s something wonderfully final about seeing a dead body. Eyes that are closed and will never open, a belly that doesn’t move with the deep, peaceful breaths of sleep. Maybe wonderful isn’t the correct word to use, but Teyla is in front of him and will never wake up again, Rodney can see her, can touch her cold, lifeless skin, and he doesn’t have to worry anymore. There is no guessing, no unknown to fret over. Teyla is dead. And no one can hurt her now.

Ronon lowers his head to the grass next to her hip, the sun shining so brightly Rodney has to shield his eyes just to see. The noise he makes isn’t animal, doesn’t come from the ferocious anger Rodney knows he feels - it’s something so delicately, heartbreakingly human that he lowers his hand to let the sun back in. It’s the most privacy he can give Ronon, and less than he deserves. How often he forgets how young Ronon is, the succinct way about him, the things Rodney knows about his past must be true but are never spoken about, making him seem to much larger than he his. Making him seem impenetrable.

But it’s Teyla between them, and there are parts of him Rodney is just seeing now, so fragile and naive, as if he thought there’d be any other outcome than this. A hope in him that couldn’t be seen properly, now obvious in it’s absence.

Maybe Rodney would be the same, his forehead pressed to the ground, not bothering to hide his tears. But whatever hope he’d had before this left with John, and disappeared the moment Rodney realized he wouldn’t be coming back with it.

Later, after they burn Teyla’s body as is custom among her people (gone, they are all gone, but someone must remember them now, and keep on remembering them), Rodney sits next to Ronon in the smoke and thinks it would be good if he could just see John’s body. Not moving. Not breathing. That would be better.

But by the time Rodney catches up to him, he’ll be dust. Not even dust. He’ll be nothing. And John will be alone, carrying the weight of a past he can’t touch anymore.

-

His favorite times are always in the morning. Rodney always wakes up before the sun, his body stuck in sleeping patterns that no longer match the world he lives in. But he gets to watch the new day break and spill into the bedroom, the light making Jennifer’s skin glow, and he touches her stomach to feel each breath she takes. She’s alive, and that’s enough. Because it has to be.

It’s enough, it’s enough, and Rodney finds he can live this life. Jennifer isn’t surprised, but she doesn’t know him, not really, not in the way other people do. Did. On the phone, Jeannie’s voice always shakes, trembles as though she could cry, has been crying, will cry forever, and she says, Are you happy, Mer?

That’s their code now. Are you happy. Can you make it through this day. Can you forget, sometimes, when you’re working or holding Jennifer’s hand, can you forget?

Are you happy, Mer?

“Yes,” Rodney says, and closes the curtains against the clear nighttime sky. A thousand little stars. Most of them, probably, dead. “Yes, of course.”

Her breath always hitches, then, because they both know such a simple answer between them will always be a lie.

When Rodney dreams there is an unnamed boy that tears through the corridors of Atlantis, chasing radio cars, his knees scraped against a skateboard. He moves with a promise that new life will always come back to old, barren things. Blooming like the first flower of spring.

-

Jennifer was, all at once, his salvation and punishment for the things he couldn’t prevent. The reality of their relationship was never some hidden thing, never some ugly truth they concealed behind a white picket fence. Sometimes they would kiss and the both of them would feel forgiven, tumbling lost and found in each other. Those are the memories Rodney holds on to, bent over his desk grading papers, a phantom press of her hand against his back telling him just get through this one more thing. But there are other memories too, the cold space between them across a kitchen table, her eyes dark, when she hated him. When his face was just a thousand people she couldn’t save, an aging reminder of a pain that remained sharp until the end, when finally she’d let go of the hurt and said don’t.

There was nothing about Jennifer that should have reminded him of anyone. But sometimes she was Sam, blowing on a fresh cup of coffee with pencil tucked behind her ear. She was Teyla, the soft sound of her singing nothing off the radio but lost Athosian lullabies. Her feet thumping on a treadmill, she was Ronon, sweaty and full of life, stealing an apple off Rodney’s tray after his morning run.

Often, too often, she was John. Tucked in bed with a book, ribbing him gently about his thinning hair, eyes bright looking over a chessboard.

Sometimes he’d let her win. Just to remember.

Rodney never hated her, not really, he’d loved her with everything that was left in him. The same way she’d loved him, holding tight to what remained, until she was gone too.

-

Rodney knows what they say about him. A shut-in, a recluse, gone mad with his failures. He catches their old, tired faces on television - the same gimmicky bowties and vests with smiling suns, desperately clinging to the small thread of hope that Earth is a planet that can still be saved. The planet is getting hotter, the seas are rising, and Rodney can’t help but think they are playing little league. Stupid children with baseball bats, swinging at every pitch that comes their way. Small ball, John would call it. Just trying to get on base. Admirable, but you can’t feel anything but bad for them. It’s a last ditch effort.

In his tiny, cluttered apartment, Rodney is rearranging the universe. The math he invents, he calls it Sheppard’s in his head, and it’s going to save two galaxies. It’s going to save John (its Rodney’s turn, it’s his turn to save his life, and when it works - which it will - John will save his again), and he’ll change history. Just by being. Rodney is so sure of it, so confident, it drives him out of bed each morning, even when his hands seize from the arthritis, when his knees protest wildly for a day off.

Much simpler than that, smaller than the significance of John Sheppard to the universe, Rodney just misses him. Misses the light, playful parts that John had teased out of him. The easy smiles and pats on the back. Misses the unknown depths of John’s mind that had been slowly opening up to him, so surprisingly warm and inviting. How he was never boring, not once, and crashed like a wave against Rodney until he’d wanted to get dragged away by the undertow.

Jeannie leans heavily against his side, both her hands cold and wrinkled wrapped around one of his. Time keeps making a fool of us, he thinks. John agrees.

“Are you happy, Mer?” she asks.

“No,” Rodney answers, but his curtains are drawn back and the sky is endless beyond his window, littered with a thousand little stars. Some of them are still burning.

-

When Rodney comes back through the gate to the SGC, Lorne greets him at the base of the ramp with a friendly hand clasped on his shoulder. He calls it a Hail Mary and they share a small, sad smile between them knowing John would appreciate it. They ride the elevator out of the mountain together, and when Rodney shakes his hand he says, “You’re a good man, Evan. Thank you.”

“I’ve seen you work miracles, doc,” Lorne says, holding the elevator open as Rodney steps out. “No reason to think this isn’t just more of the same.”

As the doors close, Rodney thinks about how he’ll never see General Evan Lorne again. It stirs something inside of him, not sad or regretful, but peaceful. The same feeling that’s been growing inside him since he’d stepped onto Atlantis again. That he’s done all he can, given all of himself to John, his mind, twenty-five years of his life, and before that, his heart. The thought makes himfeel old and sentimental, and it’s okay, because he is. -

Maybe he’d expected to die. To finish his work, to set it all in motion, and just lie down and die with his mission completed. There’d never been any time to spare thinking about what he’d do afterward. It just didn’t matter. There’d be nothing left there in those years, if they came, just an emptiness and the crushing loneliness he’d been able to ignore for a quarter of a century.

But that’s not what Rodney has. Jeannie’s grandchildren are wild animals, constantly barking with laughter, crawling into his lap and hiding their faces in his old man cardigans. Clutching at him with paint-stained fingers. Rodney’s life is so full, brimming with so much life and happiness that he hopes this isn’t something he loses. That maybe, in some universe, the children crawl from his lap to John’s, pressing sloppy kisses to his gray stubbled chin.

He thinks of it all the time. A life he’d never lived but one he might; where Teyla’s son’s eyes are bright and warm just as his mothers, and she watches him grow up strong and loved among her people. Where Ronon runs, and runs, until there’s nothing at his back anymore and he settles, catches Rodney by surprise in a bearhug the day the last of his demons are dead. Days spent with Sam in a lab, letting go of his own what-ifs, his bruised ego, watching a laugh bubble out of her, smiling big and genuine, cultivating a friendship that could conquer a galaxy.

Lazy days with John, a cat curled between them in bed. That would be enough. John’s body alive, moving his cold feet to press against Rodney’s shins, his belly rising and falling with every breath he takes. Neither of them alone. No weight too heavy for the both of them to carry.

That would be everything.

“It’s my turn,” Rodney says, and death takes him on an exhale, his eyes closed and John pressed against him, keeping him safe.

-

There’s something wonderfully hopeful about the infirmary. Rodney has never thought that before, might never think it again, but in the dim nighttime lighting John is breathing deeply in sleep, and there isn’t much room for complaining about hospital-smell. Or anything else, really. John is home, Teyla is home, and Rodney helped bring a baby into the universe. As much as any man can ever help by that point, which is just to stand there while the woman does all the work. But still.

“You know,” John says, his voice low and sluggish in that post-op way they’re all uncomfortably familiar with, “there’s run-of-the-mill hero worship, and then... there’s you.”

“You’re awake,” Rodney says. His hand, still resting on John’s knee, squeezes just a bit. Because John is really there, and Rodney can’t stop reminding himself it’s true. “What?”

“Did I change the course of history?” he says, already half asleep again, blinking up at Rodney slowly.

“And people think I’m -.”

“You thought it,” John murmurs. His face squished, pressed against the pillow. “Not me.”

“Yes, well,” Rodney says awkwardly, “I know. I’ve heard the story. One man, two galaxies hinging on his survival. Unfortunate, really, considering your aptitude for almost dying near constantly. ” 

“You thought it,” John says again, a drugged, goofy sort of smile on his face.

“I’ve been conditioned,” Rodney answers softly, scooting his chair closer to the bed. “It was your turn, and I’m accustomed to one of us saving the day.”

John huffs out a laugh as his eyes close, and before he drops back off to sleep, says, “Me too. I love you too, Rodney.”

For no reason Rodney can fathom, he thinks of Jeannie, her eyes wide, hopeful, and full of tears. In his memory, she says, how are you? Are you happy? Are you okay?

Are you happy, Mer?  
  
Yes, Rodney thinks. I am now.


End file.
